


wild oceans shake what's left of me loose (thread by thread i come apart)

by bloodaccusedstones



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3170540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloodaccusedstones/pseuds/bloodaccusedstones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laura is infinite happiness and soft lighting and a stopping point for lost souls. Maybe that’s why she dumped you for Carmilla; she’s more of a lost soul than you’ll ever be. She is a shell of a skeleton, a dead girl pretending like she isn’t a walking cemetery of broken bones and forgotten tears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wild oceans shake what's left of me loose (thread by thread i come apart)

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt on Tumblr: "not working hollence and maybe not even lawstein and full sad danny"  
> Well, here you go. Don't get mad at me, get made at the person who gave me this prompt. 
> 
> trigger warnings for depression, mentions of self harm and suicide attempt.

///

You are an orphan. It has been something that has always been strapped to your back, weighing you down, bending your spine towards the cold earth.

Maybe that’s why you’re so tall; you wouldn’t let anything hold you down and you just grew and grew until your head brushed the ceiling.

Maybe you’re so tall because your height makes you seem bigger than you really are, making you seem fuller, less broken, and you can hide all the emptiness inside you away from prying eyes.

///

You are an orphan who got lucky. After being a reckless teenager with smoke filled lungs and black eyes, you woke up to the harsh reality of the impending future ahead of you. You knew you didn’t want to spend the rest of your life (it took you a while to decide this because you really didn’t want to live) with no money and broken glass bottles between your teeth, so you decided to pull your head out of your ass and get a job.

You worked and worked for two years until you were eighteen and somehow managed to graduate with honors and a full ride scholarship to Silas University in track and field.

You packed up your two belongings (your worn journal and an old pair of boots) and hugged all the kids at the orphanage and never looked back.

///

You are an orphan. Feeling worthless is something you are used to.

But when Laura kisses you under the soft moonlight, you feel as if you can fight the gods themselves.

///

Laura is all soft and unscathed skin and you never tire of running your hands through her long, golden hair. She beams up at you and you kiss her sweetly. You will always wonder how you managed to catch something as pure as Laura but when she kisses you back with ease, you don’t think about it.

///

You kiss her collarbones and she breathes your name into your mouth and she is the heavens and the green, green grass and every beautiful sunrise you’ve ever seen. She is good for you and you have never been happier that right now with your arms wrapped around Laura’s tiny waist and legs curled together in your bed. She giggles when you kiss her nose and she runs her hand up and down your spine. She’s smiling at you with such softness, you think you are the most fragile thing alive.

///

You never ask for anything more than Laura Hollis.

///

You are an orphan. Being unwanted is something you are used to.  

So when Laura, sweet, gentle Laura, breaks up with you for a dead girl, it doesn’t sting as harshly as you think it should.

Rejection is something familiar, something that has always hung over your head, something that has stopped surprising you when you were still a child.

///

You fuck a lot of girls after Laura leaves you for a dead girl. You never fuck girls from Silas, you’re not stupid.

Beer and saltwater dreams and meaningless sex becomes your weekends. The days blur together and you can’t bring yourself to care much about anything anymore, not about teaching or about looking somewhat decent or early morning rain or soft fog. And that scares you. You remember what is was like when you were a rebellious pre-teen with no future and nothing going you and wanting to die in every waking moment and the unshakable numbness.

You feel nothing now and that really scares you.

///

You try to fuck the numbness away.

///

It doesn’t work.

///

It all hits you when you’re in the shower, all the pain and anger and heartbreak.

The water is hot, so hot it’s scalding your skin, making it pink. For some reason- whether it be your sins or your flooded mind- you feel dirty. You snatch the soap and wash your skin off your skeleton. You try to rub off everything shitty that's ever happened in your life, but somehow you know it won't help; there is always another disaster around the corner. You end up making raised red lines on your body from rubbing your nails over your skin.

You physically feel everything you have suppressed slam into your shoulders. Your legs buck and you sit in the tub before you fall flat on your face. The spray of scalding water slaps on your shoulders hard, hard enough for you to hear the sound ricocheting in your skull (that or you're going crazy) and the water gently, slowly, rolls off your back and down the drain.

You feel tears fighting their way through your eyelids and you fight them back. It’s been five weeks since Laura broke it off and you haven’t cried for her yet and you’ll be damned if you cry for her now. You throat restricts and it becomes harder and harder for you to swallow your spit and agony.

Laura is infinite happiness and soft lighting and a stopping point for lost souls. Maybe that’s why she dumped you for Carmilla; she’s more of a lost soul than you’ll ever be. She is a shell of a skeleton, a dead girl pretending like she isn’t a walking cemetery of broken bones and forgotten tears.

You are just an orphan that has broken knuckles and cracked teeth and bloody eyes and smoke filled lungs who got a lucky break and has seen more wrongs than rights being done in this world.

///

You really wanted to keep Laura, you really did. She could’ve saved you from this path of self-destruction. She reminded you how it felt to smile, something you didn’t really remember the feeling of.

///

Your tears mix with the shower water droplets, rushing down the drain, and you hope they sweep away some of this pain you have resting in your chest.

///

You are an orphan.

You’ve never been enough for a family.

You’ve never been enough for Laura.

You’ve never been enough for yourself.

You’ve never been enough.

///

You smash your hand into ligaments and cracked joints when you break your hand through the wall in one of your breakdowns.

The sting is sickly sweet.

///

"Danny?"

"What?"

"How's your hand?" You pull the hand in question down into your lap; the cast feels heavy and it burns you with reminders of how you can’t control yourself anymore.

“Alright," LaFontaine looks at you for a while, eyes squinted, as if they're trying to figure out if you’re lying. You smile at them but it ends up like a grimace because smiling is a foreign thing to you. LaF nods their head once and takes a sip of their coffee. You know they probably don't believe a word of your reassurances but you're thankful that they don't continue asking you. At Perry’s disbelieving scoff you shoot a glance at her and say, “I’m fine, Perry.”

“Oh course you would say that, Danny.”

“I’m not lying, Perry.”

“Oh really? You punched a hole in your bedroom wall, for goodness sake! You look like you haven’t been sleeping and you’ve had five cups of coffee in an hour. Five! In one hour! And your room must be a disaster!”

“Perr!” LaF looks at you with apology in their eyes but you pretend you don’t notice.

Perry is right, and you don’t really know how to feel about that.

///

You can’t seem to get out of your bed today. Which, if you’re honest with yourself, isn’t a problem, even though you know in the back of your mind that it really is. You decide it’s better to stay swaddled in blankets up to your chin all day long; you had called in earlier and said you were sick and couldn’t make it to class so you know you won’t have to go today.

You peek over the top of your blankets and your room is such a mess, you’re glad Perry isn’t here because she would probably have a heart attack. Dirty clothes and empty mugs are scattered all around your room, covering the floor and most of the countertop. There’s stacks upon stacks of papers for you to grade and you’re behind in grading, lessons behind, and you know you need to do it but you really don’t want to.

Huffing, you bury your nose back into your covers and roll onto your other side, facing the wall. You try to sleep in the middle of your bed now that Laura’s gone and took all of her warmth with her.

The empty side taunts you with your failures of never being able to keep anyone with you for long and you don’t like sleeping in it anymore but always find yourself curled in a ball under the sheets, too sad to even care.

This sadness, the resilient ache, has been inside your chest for weeks now and you want it to be gone but a small part of you thinks it will never leave you.

You remember feeling like this when you were a teenager, lonely with bruised ribs and clenched teeth. You’ve learned by now how to deal with this sudden and long period of time where you don’t feel anything; as a kid you never had anyone to talk to so you ended up learning it’s best to just swallow all your words with glass water and pray to be alright in the morning.

///

That doesn’t really work anymore.

///

You’re sitting on a park bench in the early morning hours. The moon is very bright tonight, illuminating the tree leaves. You should be sleeping because it’s three in the morning but you aren’t tired. You hear soft padding approaching you and you stiffen; only one other person would be up at this hour of the day.

She sits down next to you, back straight and pale skin glowing in the moonlight. You want to leave because you can’t stand the smell of her, let alone the sight of her. Your nails dig into your thighs, leaving crescent indentions in your skin through your pants. You bite your tongue to keep yourself from lashing out with serpent strike syllables or cruel fists (well, not so much the hitting. You can’t really punch someone with a hand in a cast).

“Well, isn’t it a little late for you to be awake?”

“I swear to god, I’m going to kill you.”

“That’s not a nice way to greet someone, Gingersnap.”

“As if you deserve a nice greeting!” You turn your body towards her, eyes flaming and scorpions under your tongue. Her beady eyes are locked onto your face and as unemotional as she think she is, you know she’s taken aback by your outburst.

“Beanpole, you-”

“No! You don’t get to say shit, _Mircalla!_ ”

“Don’t,” she grits out, eyes solid and cold, “call me that. _Ever._ ”

“Oh, I’m sorry, are you offended by that? Good, because I don’t give a shit. You fucking ruined everything!”

“What did I ruin? If anything, you ruined everything!”

“You stole Laura from me!”

She sucks in a breathe of air between her clenched teeth. “I stole nothing from you. Laura came to me. Probably unsatisfied with you.” You feel your face twist with pure rage and you know you probably look sinister because Carmilla looks a little scared.

“You. Took her away from me. I had her, she was mine and she was everything to me! I loved her! And you had to waltz right in and take her from me!”

“Laura is not a possession that can be owned, Danielle! She is not yours or even mine! She is her own entity that we have the joy of knowing. Did you know that was the one thing she couldn’t understand about you? Your need to own everything you put your hands on? Just because you touched the flame doesn’t mean you get to keep it!”  

You grit your teeth and move your body away from hers so your back rests against the backrest. Carmilla’s face is red and she looks pissed but you look straight ahead; you do enjoy riling her up but there's no fight in you anymore. You hear her sigh and you really want her to leave (emotions aren’t something you deal with and you hate Carmilla).

“She could’ve fixed me,” you whisper because she could’ve. Laura could’ve saved you from this darkness that swirls behind your eyelids and the want to break things with you bare hands.

“No, Bigfoot, only you can save yourself.”

“Really? I didn’t see you saving yourself when you had the chance to for hundreds of years. Admit it, Laura can save you, too. You can’t fix yourself. You are just the shell of a body, a dead girl pretending you aren’t. You act like there is life inside all the cracks in between your ribs but there's echos of nothing. You need Laura to fix you because you can’t fix yourself.”

“Laura is just the push I need to get back up, Groot. I can stand on my own, I just need some help. I didn’t want to be saved before Laura.”

“Exactly.” You hope she doesn’t find the hidden meaning behind what you said. “She was my happiness, the bridge that could get me to an infirmary.”

“You’re an idiot, aren’t you? You are standing in a sea of potential happiness.”

Silence fill the empty voids after her words are spilled into your hands. If anyone knows about the loneliness of existing, it’s Carmilla. Sadness flutters around you because Carmilla knows what she’s talking about and it’s taken her hundreds of years to smile, and you wonder how long it’s going to take before you do again.

“But I can’t baptize myself in it.”

In all your years you’ve been searching for a way to drown yourself in the seas of goodness but you have never found a way.

///

The door creaks closed behind you. Sighing and running a hand through your hair, you walk slowly to your bed. You toss your keys in the vicinity of your desk and plop down on the edge of the mattress. It creaks under you and it echoes the groan in your joints. You check your alarm clock and it shines a green 2:30 am in your face. You groan and place your head in the palms of your hands.

Your palms smell like the skin of another woman and it makes you want to throw up. You have just gotten back from a fling and you feel so dirty and worthless and ashamed. The heart in your chest still speaks Laura’s name and it feels so wrong, loving her and fucking others whose names and faces you don’t remember.

You grab fistfuls of hair on the top of your head and pull. A sob rips through you and you try to control your stuttering chest. Waking up your sisters with your cries is not something you wish to do. You rock back and forth, swallowing sobs as they scream against your ribs. The heels of your hands dig into your eyes and god, you feel so useless and wrong. You feel like your entire existence is wrong.

“Sta-stop crying. Stop it. Stop cr-cry-crying, Danny. Come o-on, sto-stop,” you mutter to yourself and you’re drowning in your sorrow and all the feelings you’ve suppressed in your life. You miss her, gods, you miss her.

///

You’re homesick for Laura and her gentle hands and twinkling eyes.

///

She left you. She left you for an empty corpse and you think about that everyday, before you fall asleep, in the hazy in-between when waking up, when you’re fucking another girl who isn’t Laura.

///

You built a bird’s nest in the column of her spine and you really want to fly home.

///

You’re crying so hard you’re sure someone’s woken up and you feel like you’re dying.

///

You are an orphan. You were never skilled in the art of keeping someone close. That fact has burned more holes inside you than lighters or hate ever has.

///

You end up falling asleep with dirty hands and broken lungs and self-loathing on your tongue.

///

You know your sisters are worried about you. You tumble down the stairs in the morning and a few cautiously walk around you and send looks loaded with pity in your direction.

You grab a piece of toast and run out the door. Pity has never done shit for you.

///

Elsie sits next to you one night when you’re sitting in the living room, feet perched on the coffee table, a cup of tea in your hand.

“You’re looking kinda rough, Danny,” she says and you hum for a response. She pats your knee. “I know you’re having a rough time but I...we, as in all of us, we’re here for you, you know that, right?”

“Of course,” you mumble. She sighs when you don’t look at her. You can’t bring yourself to look at her with your sad eyes and black heart. You’ve been getting worse. The restless nights have been longer and the negative thoughts have gotten crueler and you want to break every bone in your body; you want to hurt yourself.

“Danny, is there something on your mind?”

“No, not really,” you say and bring the cup up to your lips, taking a sip of jasmine tea. She doesn’t say anything and you would’ve forgotten about her presence next to you if it hadn't been for her breathing.  

“You are so beautiful, Danny,” you hear her murmur and you turn your head towards her. She looks so sad. “Even like this.”

You scrunch your eyebrows together. “Like what?”

“Sad.” Your mouth hangs open slightly as you look for words to say to that and you end up gaping like a fish. Swallowing around the logs in your throat and blinking away the tears pooling in your eyes, you look away from Elsie and towards the window. The air is still between the two of you and your tea has gone cold.

///

It’s windy and your sapphire eyes are glued on Laura and Carmilla. They don’t see you standing a ways away from where they’re sitting on a park bench.

Seeing the two of them makes you want to throw up or break something or both. Laura is still on your mind every waking second and you still hate Carmilla with every atom of your being. You still wake up screaming and fall asleep crying and want to do something stupid to yourself.

Feeling sad has become as normal as the lines on your palms.That doesn't mean that you don't want to feel something different, though, you just don’t know how to.

You turn away from them and head towards your class.

///

You wipe the snot off your nose and blink hard, trying to blink back a few stray tears. You fiddle with the rope in your hands where it's tied together, making a noose. The strands are wiry between your fingertips and you situate the rope so it’s hanging from the bathroom door.

You had found comfort in Laura, but she’s gone.

You had found comfort in other girls, but they will never be Laura.

You had found comfort in broken bones and shattered beer bottles, but you can only break yourself so many times before there is nothing left.

You had found comfort in the darkness of night but now, it only reminds you of your black heart and black eyes and black tears.

You have nothing left to comfort you, so you’re going to find comfort in the hands of death.

You feel like you have no other choice.

///

Harsh lighting is what you wake up to. For a second, you think you’ve entered the gates of heaven but you hear a sniffle, and you just know that you’re not dead.

You roll your head to you right slowly and Laura swims in your vision. Carmilla is standing behind her with LaF and Perry sitting down next to Laura. You open you mouth and cough slightly; your throat burns and it feels like you’ve swallowed fiery swords. Laura’s head shoots up and she looks at you, tears pooling in the lakes of her eyes.

“Danny,” she gasps, “Danny, I-I’m sorry.” She grabs your hand with hers and tears are falling freely from her face. You stay unresponsive and your disappointment clouds around you. You look into Carmilla’s ancient eyes and she looks reserved and slightly sad. You turn your head to look away from them.

You failed in your attempt. You aren’t surprised by this.

Failure is the only thing you’re good at.

///

The hospital assigns you to a therapist.

///

Dr. Thompson is your best friend on Tuesdays at 2:15 pm. She’s tall but not as tall as you with blonde hair and small hands. She seems alright. You’ve never been good with feelings so you don’t know how this whole therapy thing works.

“Danny, how long have you been feeling depressed?” You’ve never thought about you being depressed. It’s always seemed like something that only affects other people. Now that you look back, it makes sense though, you having depression.

“For as long as I can remember,” you tell her and she nods and her eyebrows scrunch together and sadness is all you see reflected in her green eyes.

///

You find out the it was Elsie who cut you down from your makeshift gallows. You were lucky, the doctors said, she had found you only a few seconds after you lost consciousness and there was little damage to your person.

Your throat burns and your eyes feel like glass and your hands are heavy when they tell you. They think you actually want to be here.

///

“Are you afraid of the dark?” Thompson asks, pen twirling between her fingers.

“No...maybe that’s part of the problem.” You hear her click her pen five times before she responds.

“Maybe.”

///

You end up liking her. Dr. Thompson is very nice and listens to you rant about fairness and morality and black tears and things that don't even make sense to you.

You talk about Laura a lot.

Dr. Thompson doesn't seem to mind when you only talk about Laura or stupid Carmilla.

///

You start sleeping more and stop fucking as many girls.

///

You try to be a little less sad and angry. It doesn’t always work but sometimes it does.

Sometimes, you still feel the soft caress of rope around your neck and the tears streaming down your cheeks.

Sometimes, you remember what it feels like to smile, or to hear your heart beat for you and not for anyone else.

///

Days seem a little more bearable. You feel a little less heavy and broken. You think this is a good thing.

///

You are an orphan. You want to be more than that.

**Author's Note:**

> as requested, I wrote a continuation piece titled, "rain came pouring down when i was drowning (that's when i could finally breathe)


End file.
